While many of your students will have worked on team projects in the past, they will need some guidance from you to develop the teamwork skills that will help them work effectively with their teammates. You can help students understand how to be an effective team member early on by establishing expectations for individual teams or the class as a whole. Some faculty hold a short brainstorming session for the whole class to agree on the teamwork behaviors that are most important. There are also team contracts you can introduce, where students outline their expectations and processes for handling conflicts. These strategies can prevent many of the problems that instructors are otherwise called on to mediate.

Providing opportunities for low-stakes practice starting early in the semester helps team members get to know each other and their strengths and begin to build confidence in their group. We describe a number of strategies that Cornell faculty are using below. While it’s not necessary to use all of the strategies, introducing several may encourage more familiarity and cohesion in teams. For example, you could begin by asking teams to sit together in class. 

Start with an Ice-Breaker

Ask students to discuss a series of questions with their team members. These questions can be serious or silly. For example, you might ask about a favorite course they’ve taken, what they’re good at, or what they’re curious to learn more about. You could also ask the teams to identify a ‘common-ground’ list of things they all have in common.

Get Team Members Working Together

Have team members work together on in-class activities, polling questions, or collaborative worksheets to get them used to working with each other.

Use Case Studies

Present students with case studies that highlight a variety of problem behaviors that can occur in teams or groups, or share a copy of “Coping with Hitchhikers and Couch Potatoes,” by Oakley et al. (2004), which is a supplement to the essay “Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams,” and discusses how to deal with difficult teammates. Ask team members to reflect on the case(s) individually and then with teammates. What would they do in the situation presented? Discuss afterward as a class to identify strategies to overcome or avoid team conflict.

Explore Attitudes About Teamwork

Assess your students’ attitudes about teamwork using discussion prompts that reflect a range of common feelings, both positive and negative. For example, you might use a worksheet with quotes and ask students to discuss them in small groups. Afterwards, debrief by asking students to share their biggest concerns and perceived benefits of working in teams. Gallery walks are also a good way to engage students in this process.  Display quotes on multiple whiteboards, poster boards, or large sticky notes around the room. Then have student groups rotate through, discuss each quote, and indicate their agreement/disagreement using colored sticker dots. These types of activities are often used as the first step in creating a team contract to clarify student expectations and identify potential challenges before their collaborative work begins.

Discuss Research or Resources on Teamwork

Talk with your students about the research on what makes teams successful. The findings may surprise them. Google’s research on why some work groups thrive and others struggle is a great example (Duhigg 2016). You might also assign an article on high-performing teams, such as this one from the Harvard Business Review. Ask students to write down and turn in what they felt were the three most important points.

Communicating the Value of a Collaborative Team Project

While team projects can provide valuable learning experiences for your students, not all of your students will be enthusiastic. To encourage buy-in, think about why you believe the collaborative aspects of the project are important, and communicate your rationale. Help your students understand that, similar to their academic work, teamwork is a skill that requires practice and effort. When students work in teams, each member brings their own knowledge, experience, and skills from which the entire group can benefit. It often allows them to take on more challenging tasks and deepens their understanding. You could also emphasize that many jobs require some form of teamwork and collaboration. If you’re comfortable sharing, you might even offer an example from your own career.

Structuring Teams with Student Roles and Tasks

Depending on the goals of the project, it may be preferable for students to divide up the work according to roles or tasks, or to collaborate on all aspects of the project. For some projects, dividing up the work makes sense, while in other cases it may mean that some students are not learning or refining certain key skills.

In some courses, instructors ask students to choose project roles that mimic common roles in the workplace in their field. For example, there may be a project manager, a financial analyst, a statistician, a coder, a visual designer, etc. An alternative is to ask student groups to define their own roles and tasks and decide how to divide the work. Depending on how you are planning to grade individual or group work, you could ask students to describe their roles and contributions to the project, or use techniques such as color-coding different sections of text according to the author.

Creating Team Contracts for Project Work

A major concern that instructors often have is what happens if team collaboration is dysfunctional. One way you can help prevent common problems is to ask teams to create a contract, sometimes called a team charter, that they submit to you as an assignment. Team contracts establish a shared understanding of the group’s expectations, the goals of the project, and its roles and responsibilities, and then outline the team’s processes for handling conflict. 
Contracts often begin with a worksheet that students complete on their own, then discuss with their teammates. The worksheets, which can be completed before or during class, typically address students’:  

• Past experiences with team assignments, including the positive aspects they would like to incorporate and the negative aspects they would like to avoid.
• Work styles and preferences.
• Communication methods and preferences.
• Skills and experiences.
• Preferences for the division of labor or roles.
• Availability for meetings and convenient locations.

After discussing their responses to the questions, students work on their contract together. The contract will provide a set of guidelines that all members agree to in order to make their team experience positive, fair, and effective. 

Typically, teams will agree to: 

• Interact respectfully and develop guidelines for acceptable communication.
• Give feedback constructively and assume good intent when receiving it.
• Establish a process for handling conflict. Teams should come up with an easy, agreed upon way for members to safely voice their disagreement or discomfort.
• Commit to one or more regular meeting times and record times they know they will be away or unable to work on the project.
• Decide how they will communicate outside of class.
• Determine how they will hold each other accountable for all of the above.
• Sign, date, and submit the contract.

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References

Duhigg, C. (2016, February 25). What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team. The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

Oakley, B., Felder, R. M., Brent, R., and Elhajj, I. (2004). Turning student groups into effective teams. Journal of Student Centered Learning, 2(1), 9-34.